Monstrous Hybridity: The Greco-Roman and Biblical Aesthetics of the Sea in the Long Romantic Period

Abstract

In this thesis, I chart a critically neglected aesthetic and ideological continuity between the portrayal of the sea in Romantic literature and Greco-Roman and biblical images of the sea Greco-Roman works and the Bible are shown to be foundational to the way Romantic poets imagine the sea. The Romantic sea is fundamentally theistic; that is, it is depicted as evidence of the presence of God and gods in the world. The sublime force of the Romantic sea is based upon a continuation of the sublimity of the dichotomies of Greco-Roman seas. I identify the Romantic maintenance of Greco-Roman and biblical depictions of the sea in two main ways. First, I identify a general pattern I refer to as monstrous hybridity. Like the fabulous sea monsters of Greco-Roman works and the Bible, with their multiple heads, grotesque proportions and combinations of body parts, Romantic seas are hybrid fusions of acute contradictions. Romantic seas reflect the extreme, ostensibly inextricable and dichotomous nature-the monstrous hybridity-of the ideas and emotions tied to the sea in Greco-Roman and biblical works. Second, I identify specific sets of dichotomies in Greco-Roman and biblical portrayals of the sea that endure and are resolved through appeals to supernatural presences in the work of Romantic writers. These specific dichotomous sets are placed under the following headings: the feminine supernatural, the heroic sea journey, the Roman masculine virtue and God 's control over the waters. My claim for the Greco-Roman and biblical character of the Romantic sea is primarily based on a comparative analysis of the portrayals of the sea in Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and the Bible, with portrayals of the sea in the poetry and prose of Ann Radcliffe, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charlotte Bronte. In the five chapters based on these individual writers, the tempestuous sea journeys of Greco­ Roman works and the generative and purgative seas of the Bible are imagistically and ideologically inscribed into Romantic seas. In Shelley's poetry, the dichotomies of the sea are not resolved by a Christian God or the gods or heroes of pagan antiquity, they become humanist paradoxes best illustrated through his portrayal of utopian sea isles.